Walkabout Art
a hundred whitefellas who eagerly assisted them in finishing two, very large dot paintings. The Americans went crazy. "You guys have changed my life!" one woman enthused. Others wrote poems which they gave as gifts. "This is worth a million bucks of great PR," a travel agent said.
After the first week, the pattern was set: dot painting workshops from nine to five; live performances of poems and song cycles in the evenings. Whenever possible, an hour or two was set aside so that Dinny and Paddy could raid the local secondhand clothing stores where they bought dresses, shirts, coats, blouses, belts, and ties for their wives, daughters, sons, grandchildren and cousins. They had come to America with nothing, and after the first week were lugging round a half a dozen suitcases each.
Collectively, we traveled to America to entertain and exchange information with poets and Native Americans – to sing, paint, tell stories and perform poetry. Individually, however, the agendas were much more diverse.
I had returned to the land of my birth, seeking some kind of homecoming, only to realize that nothing much was left of my childhood except for Tootsie Rolls and Dr Pepper.
Nigel Roberts, orbiting in on a pilgrimage to Kerouac and Ginsberg, landed in the middle of the "New Age" and discovered that the old Australian custom of smoking a cigarette was practically a capital offense. Terry Whitebeach, the part-Aboriginal performance poet from Tasmania, explored her own identity and sense of self in the broken mirror of Native American culture.
As for Dinny and Paddy… in the eyes of some, they were the mystic elders, the carriers of ancient wisdom, the connection with a deep, spiritual past so many Americans craved. But was this really a spiritual odyssey through the land of the eagle, or merely a hunt for kuka (steak), beer and singing and painting money for their families?
(Re-birther from Santa Cruz: "Hey, last week we had the Dalai Lama through here! Great to see you guys!")
From small fringe theatres in Santa Cruz and San Francisco to huge auditoriums in San Jose and San Diego, thousands turned out; platoons of poetry lovers, brigades of New-Agers, armies of curiosity seekers. Bill Clinton's America was in a celebratory mood.
Following the trail of the early pioneers, we traveled east on the Super Chief (the old Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway), across the desert to the trendy New Age world of multi-millionaire
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